Vultures are among the most threatened bird groups globally, facing poisoning, habitat loss, and persecution. Their welfare and ecological role as nature's sanitation engineers deserve greater recognition.
Vulture welfare involves the paradox of animals that cause little individual suffering but face catastrophic population-level threats with welfare consequences for entire communities. Poisoning is the dominant welfare threat: vultures dying from diclofenac, lead, or deliberate poison experience prolonged and painful deaths — renal failure from diclofenac, neurological damage from lead, and acute poisoning from deliberately baited carcasses. Individual suffering is severe and prolonged. At the population level, the collapse of vulture populations in South Asia — from hundreds of millions to near-extinction within a decade — is a conservation and welfare catastrophe. Diclofenac bans in human medicine (it contaminates carcasses) and the shift to vulture-safe alternatives like meloxicam have aided recovery. Lead ammunition replacement is progressing more slowly.